All About Drama

This morning I finished reading The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a first novel about a father who gives his retarded daughter away while his wife is still unconscious from the delivery. I admired certain things about it, like the very real and very annoying tendency we all have to hear someone else’s truth and focus on ourselves. The novel’s characters all do that to a fault. One ordinarily self-contained person shares an honest thought or feeling, and the listener automatically says, “What about me? What about my drama?” I also thought The writer did a good job of capturing how we interpret other people’s actions in the framework of our own assumptions about them and about the way the world works. Someone says or does something with one intent. Other characters respond as if something else were meant.

But what was most compelling for me was the father. I was drawn by his motivation and fascinated by his guilt. I was so drawn to him, in fact, that I noticeably lost interest when I realized he would no longer be appearing, and when I became conscious of that loss of interest, I remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine about how books with happy endings are less satisfying somehow than books that end sadly. I think that’s because happy endings are so much harder to write, happiness so often sounding like platitude, not reality.

For me, this book fell into platitude because I don’t believe that a mother who’s been mourning the death of her perfect daughter for twenty-five years simply accepts the retarded replacement, without wondering what she did wrong or why she was being punished or whichever of the lines from that script that the parents of children with disabilities act out before they learn to love the versions of themselves they never expected to give birth to. I especially don’t believe it from this set of characters—all self-absorbed in the extreme.

The book also gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own writing. The novel has too many little dramatic arcs and small unnecessary complications. For example, the father goes out of town to give a talk. He’s supposed to be gone over night, but instead, he disappears for three days. The family is in a panic and calls the police. When he does come home, he brings an unexpected guest. Later that afternoon, there’s an argument, and the eighteen-year-old son runs away from home, necessitating another call to the police, and the next day, the mother is frantic because she still has the guest in her home, an important business account to maintain, news of her sister’s cancer diagnosis to contend with, an extra marital affair to break off, and her son’s continued absence to worry over. That moment would have been as dramatic (or more) if complicating factors had been trimmed down to one or two problems. The marriage was going badly, so things would have been tense enough if the father had called to say he’d be staying away an extra day or two, then stayed away longer. His coming home with the guest, a character who’s presence doesn’t seem all that necessary to me, is complicating enough. The argument would have happened more or less as it did. And the son (instead of running away, stealing a neighbor’s car, and getting busted for shoplifting) could have just disappeared for a few hours and come home pissed or drunk and made more or less the same scene he had at central booking. The mother could have been just as frantic at the office the next day, stewing over the guest in her home and over the affair she’s breaking off, an important moment in her character’s development. My guess is that this excess of drama comes from an inexperienced writer’s fear that one problem is not serious enough to make the reader understand why a character does one thing or why the action takes a specific turn.

My novel, the literary one, and my novella are retellings of one another. The novella came first. When I wrote it, I didn’t think I’d write anything else, so I felt the need to cram it with every important scene I could think of and to fill it with drama and complications so as to compel the reader. When I wrote the novel, I discovered that some of the scenes in the novella actually belong in the longer work and that the two stories are too similar. At one point, I thought of them as being the same story only one when the protagonist is having a good day and the other when she’s having a bad day. Lately, I’ve discovered that they’re actually two different stories, but I’ll need to do a lot of work on the novella to draw that story out.

Puntitas reads _The Memory Keeper’s Daughter_ by K. Edwards.

In the Details

When is a piece of writing ever done? That’s the question I struggle with most. I think things are done. Then I read them again months or years later, and I realize they’re not. That more than anything keeps me from feeling like an accomplished writer.

Real writers know. Real writers read their work years later, say, “I would write that better now,” but feel satisfied that the poem or story was written well. I write, and when I read the piece again from a stranger’s distance, I think, “This is the work of an amateur.”

Most often, the devil for me is in the details. Without much trouble, I catch gaps in the logic or the plot, and I catch inconsistencies in images or characters,. Where I’m likely to find problems is in the nuance suggested by all the little details: the gesture a character makes at a key point in the dialog, the shape or size of an object on a table, the length and rhythm of a paragraph or line. Sometimes they contradict me. Sometimes they distract. Sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they do too much. The frustration is that, when they’re working, I know God is in the details.

Last Sunday, I reread my two sonnets and another one of the poems I’ve been working on relatively recently. Over all, I like the sonnets. They’re clear, detailed, and easy to read. The endings, which had been my great concern, hit the right notes in both what they say and how they leave the reader feeling. On the Shakespearean sonnet, I unchanged most of what I’d changed the last time I worked on it. That realization was what ultimately decided me to call the poem finished.

When I read the Miltonian sonnet, I discovered it read much better than I expected. I spent most of my energy changing details in the octave to develop the image in the title. The bony whore seems more out of place than ever, but she was too helpful in the writing and is too precise about the nature of the wait for me to let go of her yet, so I may send the poem out a few times before I can get up the nerve to replace her with some other story.

The third poem is one I’ve never mentioned here. I like it for lots of different reasons. It was well received in workshop. It’s got a solid build. It’s a tribute to the power of art. It made me feel close to the friend who inspired it. I’ve sent it out a few times, but it hasn’t been picked up. Each time I read it, I notice some of the details “aren’t there yet,” a wonderful expression I heard to describe a lack of readiness to understand or articulate, and though more of the details are contributing to the wholeness of the poem now, many of them still are not. How long will I have to wait? How long?

When I consider How My Light Is Spent (Some more)

Ah, the post partal effluvia has receded. I read my Miltonian sonnet last night, and it has ceased to be the quintessential Miltonian sonnet, the one he would have written if his sensibilities were mine.

Fortunately, I still like it. I revised, of course, more editing than real revision, and I haven’t changed my mind about sending it out soon.

Most of the changes involved adding more periods. The poem was basically two long sentences, and while grammatical and perfectly clear, they made the whole thing overly dense. I broke it up, not easy when meter and rhyme need to be taken into account. The effect is to make the tone more anxious, angrier. That wasn’t quite what I was going for, but I think it works, so I’ll probably leave it alone.

The most significant changes, the ones that were real revisions, happened in the last line. It sounded very cryptic to me sans post partal effluvia, so I spent over an hour writing and rewriting it. Now its sense is clearer, but I’m not sure that it will have any meaning to the general reader.

What does that mean?

I made the mistake of Googling the sonnet. The blog entries I read discuss it in very conventional terms: the speaker wonders if he will be judged by God for not exercising his gifts to the fullest, then realizes (1) that God, the giver of all gifts, doesn’t need humans to do His work for Him and (2) that standing and waiting is work enough. Of course, the bloggers emphasize the tragedy of blindness, which is what prompts the speaker’s musings in the first place.

For the general reader, a sighted reader, that tragedy is one of the assumptions of the poem. For the speaker, blindness is a fact, and it’s a hardship, but its tragedy is that it may be a possible obstacle to salvation. My own reading of the situation, not the poem, is that what impedes the speaker from exercising his gifts is not his blindness, but the small mindedness of others, who, in not recognizing that he can be an instrument of God as well as they, fail to exercise the gift/responsibility of loving their neighbors as themselves. Saying all of this in a few short lines is hard. It’s even harder when the reader is unwilling to rethink the nature of the tragedy and his or her roll in it.

Another thing I noticed about my response to Milton’s sonnet is that one of the images (the bony whore) that was key during the writing seems to be unimportant now. It isn’t altogether irrelevant. It suggests by analogy. But what I’ll have to decide is whether that analogy or another will work best.

I should reread other poems now that I’m sitting in the arid glare of reality.

the ends and the Means

I’m back to the syllabic poem. It’s two pages long. The last time I worked on it, I revised the first fourth or maybe third. When I reread it tonight, I noticed the changes helped a lot.

With more of a reason for the mood of the poem, the middle section (of the villanelle-like repetitions) feels necessary, the obvious outcome of what comes before. On initial reading, I thought I’d leave it alone, but as I went through it line by line, I decided it can do more and should to make the significance of the lost poem resonate. Once I add to that middle section, I should be able to cut most of the final fourth.

I have to be careful about the way I write, pushing myself past the desire to quit, but not so hard that I don’t want to return. So far, I’ve managed to make myself write for at least an hour at a time.

The old habit, the one I’m trying to avoid, is to write myself into a panic attack, obsessing over word choice, punctuation, syntax, decisions about what comes next. I’ve written so little over the last six years because I’ve wanted to think and feel differently as I write.

My first step was patience. Relying on the muse, I’ve written a story, revised three others, drafted a couple of poems, and revised half a dozen. I’ve put no real pressure on myself to publish or even declare a piece to be done, though once or twice a year, I’ve sent out a stack of envelopes to wait for the rejections.

After that, I started writing regularly. I tried for a, but the medium that’s worked best for me is the discussion list: hitting the send button is about as final as a thing gets. If I put myself in the roll of explainer, I can create opportunities for myself to produce thorough messages about things and send them off, learning to become clearer and less self-conscious at the same time.

I’ve learned so much about writing and about trusting myself from the lists. They’ve helped me do what I’m trying now: keeping the blog and writing several times a week.

It isn’t easy. As I stumble over an image or decision, a physical pressure moves slowly up my arms, settling on my shoulders, and wrapping over the center of my chest, lightly, but definitely, like the subtlest of threats. At those times, I make decisions, and I ignore, drawing on the hours of fast and careful writing I’ve learned to do. After all, one of the many things I’ve learned from sitting in on hundreds of hours of other people’s therapy for a living is that the memory of a positive experience can encourage other positive experiences. Other lessons are less profound, like positive self-talk should not include words like “asshole” and “dumb fuck,” but the minor lessons have their uses too.

One of the current topics of my knitting list is the difference between process knitters and project knitters. The latter decide on a specific item, gather their materials, research or experiment with new techniques, and get to work. The former experiment or research new techniques, gather materials, find interesting projects, start them, get side tracked, return, frog or continue as the spirit guides. The point for one group is to meet a goal; for the other, it’s simply to knit.

I’m very much a process knitter. I’ve got three or four projects going at one time, hate them all during the endless middle third, and complete them only by popping a juicy book into the player days or hours before they have to be done.

I realized, as I was thinking about my knitting, that I’m not a very goal oriented writer either. Well, yes, the Nobel is the fantasy, and having a book in print in order to get a nice secure job is also a concern, but if writing were a real goal, I’d have to invest a lot more time and emotional energy into (a) writing, (b) submitting, and (c) keeping up with the field. I’ve always been afraid of approaching writing in those terms because of the severity of the writing anxiety that plagued me throughout my entire education, but I’m thinking now that, if writing became a series of practical steps and reasonable goals, it might also become less terrifying. This may be how I need to reframe the process for myself in order to make writing a profession, not a hobby.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent (continued)

My Miltonian sonnet has a title now, and excerpt from the original. At the moment, I think it’s hot stuff, but right now I have no judgment.

I’m bathing in the post partal effluvia of my own brilliance. Not arrogance: the cherished delusion that evaporates all too quickly. Why is it that whatever we write is perfect for about a month and only that all too fleeting month? After that, public bathroom graffiti is a goal to strive for. Alas, alack.

I read the sonnet again two days ago. I did a little tinkering, substituting words that don’t conjure images with those that do (harried whore to bony whore) and snipping a few function words (mostly articles) to help the images roll into one another. I spent a while on the last line, which sounded about as meaningful as the cryptic writing on the stall.

When I reread the poem just now, I’d forgotten about the last line. The changes seem to work though the image is different from what I had been going for. For my original idea to make sense, the reader would have to know what a talent is (a unit of measure in money) in order to get a really bad pun that isn’t particularly clever even at the most superficial level. The line as it actually reads, however, draws on the image of the houses like tombs and does something more complex.

Were I not floating in my own effluvia, I could never admit that poems really do write themselves. It’s a matter of getting the tool at the word processor to let them.

And I’m a Knitter Too

We may as well get the unpleasantness out of the way once and for all. I’m a knitter, and knitting is part of my writing process, so knitting will appear here from time to time.

First, I’m usually listening to audio books while I’m knitting, so I’m thinking about how a piece of writing is put together while I’m also thinking about how a piece of knitting is constructed. If I don’t have anything to listen to, I plan my next piece of writing or work out the kinks in a current project.

Second, knitting has taught me to think differently about how to accomplish a goal. When I knit, I think about what it is I want to achieve. Then I think about all of the little tricks and techniques that can theoretically help me do that. Most of the time, I’m dead wrong, but every once in a while I pull it off. In the knitting realm, two no-hole sock patterns are my major accomplishment, It was also the project that helped me realize I can do the same with writing and other things. My most recent application of the principle has been in the sonnet: I’m giving myself the task of figuring out what I want the ending to do.

Third, since most of what I know about knitting comes from the web, I’ve learned to research and enjoy it. Now I actually stop in the middle of a piece of writing to look things up or—stunner of all stunners—to read a book or two on the subject. With the Shakespearean sonnet, I looked up information about root systems. Almost none of it made it into the poem, but I did move some details around to be consistent with reality. A newer poem started entirely as research, and turning facts to poetry has been quite the task.

SO I’ll post patterns from time to time, and if I can talk someone into taking pictures for me, I’ll post them too.

WDG Near Completion

Just a little celebration. I think I finished my Shakespearean sonnet last night. I had a breakthrough about some rough patches. A few words fell into place (at this stage, it comes down to words), and some of the flab dropped out of the final couplet.

Funny how a week ago I was still thinking that nothing could be cut without the poem losing its concreteness. Then last night I suddenly noticed words that added only syllables and places where the poem stalled in repetition or digression. Without conscious effort, I was able to substitute metric props for content and did more of the work I needed to do for the poem to reach its destination. This is one of those moments of possession that is almost as magical as the rare poem that writes itself.

When I read it again just now, the pacing of the poem surprised me a little, and the shift from the beginning section to the end worked well.

I’m still not sure about the last two words: they say what needs to be said, but they don’t mark the end of the journey the way a rolling pipe organ or a single stroke of the triangle does. As I write, I realize that the problem may be that I start with the unusual and move to the ordinary—serious flaw. Party canceled.

I vaguely remember that some of Willy S.’s sonnets don’t end up at Rhodes. I’ll have to read a few to examine how he gets from Point A to Point B and make it work.

Revising WDG

Yuck and double yuck!

I’ve worked on a poem a couple of days this week, and the ending is a real struggle. Hitting the right note, the one that lets you twist the action of the poem or surprise the reader in a way that is satisfying without being “clever” is hard, hard work.

This is a Shakespearean sonnet I wrote eight or ten years ago. I thought it was done. Then I worked on it before the thesis and again afterward. Each time, IT WAS DONE. The current set of revisions was sparked by a rejection letter, even though it was done.

I ask you flatly, “How can anybody turn down greatness?”

When I read it last month, I decided the mood of the first half didn’t match the mood of the second. My options were to figure out why and incorporate the transition into the poem or to make the moods consistent. After some wishy-washiness and confusion, I opted for the latter.

Then I realized the ending didn’t do anything but repeat what the rest of the poem had been saying. Eight or ten years ago, when I wrote the thing, the ending did something very different. That difference didn’t fit into the current poem, but if I emphasized more of the mood of the body, I could reintroduce the old ending as a twist.

More rewriting, rerhyming, and rethinking. A personal high five for working in the word “mucilage.” Lots of whining. The final couplet. A tightening of the heart at my own use of language.

Sleep.

Reboot.

Read.

WHO FUCKED UP MY POEM?

The ending makes little sense. The final couplet is strong in that it manages both to detach from the first twelve lines and to connect firmly to the rest of the poem. It’s got images and emotive thrust, but the words themselves, especially the last two don’t really say what they need to.

I’ll probably let it stew for a while. If I haven’t figured it out in a couple of weeks, I’ll ask a friend to read it.